Home Legend laminate stays on shelf for now - Court denies Mannington request for preliminary injunction

[Rome, Ga.] On April 9 the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, based here, denied Mannington’s request for a preliminary injunction that would have forced Home Legend to remove its Home Legend Maple laminate floor collection from 1,800 Home Depot locations.

The legal tussle began when Mannington issued Home Legend a “cease and desist” order on Sept. 28, 2012 alleging that Home Legend’s Maple collection infringes upon copyrighted designs featured in Mannington’s Time Crafted Maple laminate flooring. In response, Home Legend filed suit on Oct. 8, 2012 with the intention of having Mannington’s copyright declared invalid by the court. While a date for that trial by jury has not yet been set, Mannington filed motion on Nov. 30, 2012 to initiate the preliminary injunction to remove the alleged infringing product from market in the meantime but was unsuccessful.

“The evidence at this point does not permit the court to determine that the defendant [Mannington] has a valid copyright and consequently cannot obtain a preliminary injunction,” according to District Court Judge Harold Murphy in court papers dated April 11. “The defendant [Mannington] has also not demonstrated that it will suffer irreparable harm in the absence of an injunction.”

Despite recognizing the “substantial similarity” between the products in question, Murphy said legal precedence does not accept Mannington’s physical process of handscraping and staining natural wood to achieve unique laminate visuals as “sufficiently original to warrant copyright protection” — at least not to a degree that warrants the removal of allegedly infringing product before a trial by jury can take place.

“The judge’s opinion was that the Home Depot customer is a different customer than our customer so there’s not enough damage to warrant an injunction, which is ludicrous. That’s exactly why we are fighting so hard. We hang our hat on style and design and if we don’t fight this we just give them free license to copy us,” said Dan Natkin, director of wood and laminate flooring, Mannington.

Also complicating matters was the testimony of Joe Garofalo, Home Legend’s executive vice president of sales, which revealed the allegedly infringing visuals were not the creation of Home Legend but of third-party décor suppliers Lenox, Mass.-based InterPrint and China-based J&F Impregnated Paper Co.

Mannington has appealed the decision denying a preliminary injunction against Home Legend while both parties prepare for the still unscheduled jury trial.
“The District Court in Rome held that Home Legend did not have to immediately stop selling its laminate products pending a full trial,” said Sherry Flax, Mannington’s attorney and partner at Mid-Atlantic law firm Saul Hewing. “Mannington has filed an interlocutory appeal to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals requesting a review of whether the District Court applied the correct law in its ruling. The ultimate issue of whether Home Legend is infringing Mannington’s copyright remains to be decided.”

While counsel for Home Legend was consulted for this story, they chose not to comment directly.